Margaret Atwood Quotes

Its a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, its equally assumed youre lying your head off.

Margaret Atwood

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

Margaret Atwood

The problem is huge. Weve just added seventy-five million people to the already large proportion of people in the world who are malnourished all the time, whose bodies are being starved.

Margaret Atwood

The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.)

Margaret Atwood

Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.

Margaret Atwood

I am nervous about dogmas of any kind, whether they be religious, political, or anti-religious. Too many heads have rolled because of them.

Margaret Atwood

Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

Margaret Atwood

Its very hard for students not to be in debt unless theyve got big scholarships or rich parents. And its called investing in your future, but like any investment its risky because your future is an unknown quantity. However, if you dont invest in your future, you may be flipping hamburgers for the rest of your life. So its a real dilemma.

Margaret Atwood

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

Margaret Atwood

When youre unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

Margaret Atwood

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change.

Margaret Atwood

You think you have the amount of money that is your credit limit. Were just wired to think that, you know? Until the bill arrives - a sobering moment - you think youre richer than you are.

Margaret Atwood

Better never means better for everyone It always means worse, for some.

Margaret Atwood

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

There are some women who seem to be born without fear, just as there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain Providence appears to protect such women, maybe out of astonishment.

Margaret Atwood

Under the old system - which is now so archaic that a lot of people cant remember it - if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldnt take out money that you didnt have. But with the credit card you can spend money you dont have, and that is just so tempting.

Margaret Atwood

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

Margaret Atwood

Were facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. Weve run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue.

Margaret Atwood

You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. Youve been backstage. Youve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Margaret Atwood

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

Margaret Atwood